Today was my last day teaching in the jungle schools. At this particular school , for some reason every morning when we arrive we go for a little walk up and down the streets to each child's house and basically cajole and shame them into coming to school. I am sort of of the opinion that if they don't want to come, I shouldn't have to personally invite them, but it isn't really my place to say this. But today, instead of having to walk down to this house where a gaggle of boys lives, they actually ran up to us on the street. Great! They were excited for school!
The sight of these 8 boys running to school is actually one of my favorite images of the whole jungle project. It was such a bright, sunny day, and the boys were so excited to go to school that they ran there in little spurts of sprinting. They would all race in a pack to whatever the next destination might be. In this blur of mismatched, dirty, and colorful clothing they sped from rock pile, to tree, to cow, all the way until they reached the school yard. I was thinking it was going to be a great last day, full of enthusiasm, love, jokes, and a passionate desire to learn.
And it was. For about 40 minutes. The boys were not so skilled at the word searches we gave them, but were very eager to learn and impress us, and they were really into painting animals on rocks, despite the fact that we kept yelling at them to stop mixing the colors. Things were going great, until we made a fatal error. Because by this point it was "pissing rain" as the Brits would call it, Jeff and I REALLY did not want to play an outdoor game with them. So we let the kids go and play some soccer on their own. Mistake. After that, they were totally unwilling to be re-reigned in. They refused to come back inside to do a nature activity, and kept on mimicking everything we were saying and making mean faces. The ones who did come inside did so only to rip up the nature poster templates that we had made. At one point I went up to one boy to pull him back inside only to discover he was peeing on the soccer court. Charming.
After about 20 minutes of chasing and yelling, I finally told the boys that if they weren't going to sit down and do English, or at least be semi-respectful of us, then they would need to go home. They went home. Not quite the effect I was going for...
I was really torn as to whether or not I handled that situation the right way. On the one hand, I'm a volunteer hear and me helping them to learn is solely for their benefit. But on the other hand, they really don't get much of a chance to just play around and be silly because a lot of them come from rough, poor families. On some level, I know this and totally sympathize, but when a group of 8 year old boys is flipping you the bird as you try to teach them the difference between an adjective and verb, it is a wee bit difficult to beg them to stick around. Was I too impatient with them? Should I have tried different strategies to engage them? Or discipline them? Who knows, but I do know that in my semester of service in Quito I will certainly get more opportunities to ask (and hopefully) answer these questions!
Finally, after
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